by Graham Joyce
Turning back to the playground he caught Clive by the arm. ‘Hey, watch this.’ Designating two other boys to be ready to catch him, he plugged his ears with his fingers and inhaled deeply, very rapidly, until he fainted clean away. The boys caught him, and within a few seconds he recovered consciousness.
‘Hey!’ said Clive, and he too wanted to try. The same thing happened. Then the other two boys each had a go, followed by Terry, and within moments they had an audience of ten or fifteen kids, all waiting to take a turn at the new game. The audience doubled, tripled, until the entire playground was full of kids watching.
Then a strange thing happened. Sandra Porter from Sam’s class suddenly fainted without even hyperventilating. The same thing happened to Janet Burrows and to Wendy Cooper, followed by Mick Carpenter, and then three other girls, and four more boys, until they were all fainting clean away, the entire playground full of kids, over one hundred and sixty on the school roll, all drifting to the ground like petals from a blown rose.
Sam saw teachers running from the school building. Terry and Clive were among the last to fall, and Sam thought he’d better go down with them. He heard the teachers moving among the bodies crying, ‘Stop this!’ and ‘Stop this at once!’ But it was fully three minutes or so before the first children started to recover. Sam opened his eyes briefly and saw, sitting on the fence ringing the school yard and grinning with satisfaction, the Tooth Fairy. Then he was gone.
When the children started to recover, no one seemed able to offer the teachers any explanation for what had happened. It just became The Day Everyone Fainted. The incident was written up in the Coventry Evening Telegraph and described as a case of mass hysteria.
Somehow the episode was never traced back to Sam.
7
The Cage
It was a day off school when he preferred not to have a day off school. Life in the Unusual Objects Society was becoming progressively more interesting, and now he was going to have to miss a session when Terry had promised to bring along an unexploded cartridge from his father’s twelve-bore shotgun. Clive had formed the Unusual Objects Society only the week before, recruiting Sam and Terry into membership by producing a Nazi armband: blood-red with a black swastika sewn on to a white disc, it had fallen into Eric Rogers’s possession during the war. Conditions of membership required the production, on a daily basis, of an item of equal or similar interest. Terry, on his day, had brandished a cat’s-eye road reflector, stolen from his father’s workshop. Sam delivered an Egyptian temple token, which, according to his father, had come from Christ-knew-where. Terry had promised to produce the shotgun cartridge on the day Sam’s appointment at the eye hospital came up.
To get to the eye hospital required a modest walk to the bus stop, a tedious bus ride into the city and then another considerable hike to reach the hospital. Then back again. Sam’s mother was in no mood for nonsense. When Sam complained for the fifth time that he didn’t want to go to the eye hospital, she trussed him in his duffel-coat, stuffed his head inside its hood and shook the hood until his head spun. He was standing at the bus stop before the world settled down again.
Before the bus arrived, Chris Morris’s souped-up MG Midget scorched past, exhaust cracking out an inordinate roar, heading in the direction of town. Thirty yards beyond the stop the Midget squealed to a halt, paused and reversed back towards them at high speed. The passenger door flipped open and Morris leaned across to offer them a death’s-head smile. Fingering the steering wheel, he revved the accelerator aggressively. Connie looked doubtful.
‘It’s a lift,’ Sam said to his mother, as if the sudden appearance of the sports car was a portent requiring expert interpretation.
Sam climbed into the well behind the driver while his mother did her best to lower herself into the bucket seat with some kind of dignity. As Morris set off at speed she was pressed back into the seat, fumbling at her skirt with her knees in the air. They were half way into town before Morris said anything.
‘She’s mad, you know,’ he declared in a very quiet, controlled voice.
‘Who?’ said Connie.
‘She is. Completely mad. Barking. Expect she’s given you all her side of the story. What women do, isn’t it?’ Morris slammed to a stop at a red light but only at the last moment.
‘She hasn’t said anything to me.’
Sam sat in the back, looking from his mother’s face to Morris’s. The adults conducted their conversation with eyes glued to the road in front of them. The lights changed, Morris slipped into gear and Connie’s knees went up in the air again.
‘Anything she says is a lie. I expect you know that. You women. You know how people are.’
‘Yes.’
‘ALL RIGHT IN THE BACK THERE?’ Morris suddenly bellowed at Sam, as if they were cruising at altitude in an open aeroplane. ‘ALL RIGHT?’
‘Yes,’ Sam answered happily.
‘He’s all right,’ Morris said, his eerie, quiet voice taking over again. ‘He’s all right.’ His fingers gripped the steering wheel. ‘At least.’
‘Just here would be nice,’ said Connie.
‘Huh?’
‘Drop us just here.’
After they climbed out of the car, Connie gripped Sam’s hand, watching the Midget zoom towards the top of the town. ‘Fast,’ said Sam. ‘Mr Morris drives fast. Where’s he going?’
‘Straight to hell,’ said Connie. ‘Don’t you push me in that car again.’
Mr Morris’s lift had made them early for the hospital appointment, so Connie took Sam to the top of the town, to see the hour strike. Under the clock in Broadgate a set of doors flipped open, and a curious, mechanical Lady Godiva, following a horseshoe track, made unsteady passage. Above her head a second mechanical window revealed a wide-eyed Peeping Tom stealing a forbidden glance. Sam was more fascinated by Tom than by the wobbling naked lady. The clock struck.
‘Blinded,’ said Connie.
‘Why?’
‘Looking when he shouldn’t have been looking.’
They made their way from Broadgate to the hospital. Sam’s heart was heavy. He wondered if he too was being blinded for having seen things he should not have seen. Perhaps he was sharing Tom’s punishment for having seen the Tooth Fairy.
On the way, Connie stopped at one of the surviving gates of medieval Coventry. A gargoyle leered at them from the gothic arch overhead. Its teeth were sharpened to points. Sam took Connie’s hand. As they passed through the gate, he was afraid that when he emerged from the arch on the other side, the world might be irredeemably changed.
‘Is Mickey in the cage or out of the cage? In or out?’ The fat nurse was becoming irritated. She’d put this question to Sam three times, and he was finding himself unable to answer truthfully.
He didn’t like the eye hospital. The waiting room was full of people with patched, plastered or bandaged eyes. Intimidating wall posters admonished people to PROTECT YOUR EYES: NO SPARES. From there he was frog-marched into a small, darkened room where he had to read an eye chart, and thence to a Stygian cavern where a fiendish, metal-mask contraption was settled on the bridge of his nose, and where he was instructed to report on the performance of tiny, winking red and green lights.
‘Are they going to let me go?’
‘Of course they are,’ Connie soothed. ‘Not long now.’
Later he was bullied into another, lighter room, where the fat nurse pushed him into a seat before a table bearing a black box. Fat nurse pressed a switch and the black box was suddenly illuminated, presenting him with an image of Mickey Mouse and an iron cage. Fat nurse held a card at his eye.
‘Is Mickey in the cage or out of the cage?’
A species of binoculars was clamped to the front of the black box. Sam was commanded to look through the binoculars. They had an evil smell, of rubber and metal. Fat nurse did something to make the left glass of the binoculars go blank.
‘Is Mickey in or out?’
Sam was so afraid that his answer was,
‘Yes.’
The nurse sighed deeply. ‘In or out?’
‘In. Yes.’
The left glass opened again. ‘Is Mickey in or out of the cage?’
Sam hesitated. The question presented a problem, in that Mickey was both in and out of the cage. He could see two Mickeys, one clearly out of the cage and a second image, slightly hazier but recognizable, inside the cage.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Either,’ said the fat nurse, ‘he’s in or he’s out. Is Mickey in or out?’
Sam held his breath. He knew it was crucially important not to cry. Where was his mother?
He bit his lip and waited. The nurse slammed her pen down on the table. ‘In or out?’ she said. ‘For goodness’ sake, in or out?’
‘In.’
The nurse seemed satisfied. She picked up her pen and ticked a box on her clipboard paper. She changed the glass. ‘Now?’
‘In.’
‘Now?’
‘In.’
‘That’s better. Easy, isn’t it?’ The nurse’s mood had swung dramatically. Sam secretly sighed with relief. ‘In’ seemed to be the correct answer, the one which won everybody’s approval. After a while he was allowed to go.
He was given a seat in an empty corridor and told to wait while Connie spoke with the doctor. A young nurse passed and smiled at him. The minutes passed. Someone sat on the chair next to him, but Sam, lost in his own thoughts, didn’t look up.
‘I feel bad about it,’ said the figure next to him. ‘I feel bad, so I’ve got something for you.’
Sam glanced up. It was the Tooth Fairy. Sam identified the smell from his bedroom when the Tooth Fairy had visited, varied only slightly. Now it was a smell of hay and leather and horse’s sweat. In the daylight the Tooth Fairy looked slightly uglier. Its squint was pronounced, and its short physique seemed tougher, like something made of wire and coiled springs. ‘You’re a boy,’ said Sam.
The Tooth Fairy clicked his teeth in irritation. ‘You won’t always see me this way. Only for now. Look, I feel bad about putting you through all this. I mean this thing with your eye. I’ve come to give you something.’
‘What? What do you mean?’
‘That little friend of yours. The one with the limp.’
‘Terry?’
‘He’s marked. But listen. Saturday it is. You damn well find a way, right? You damn well find a way to keep that kid at your place, eh? Saturday night.’ The Tooth Fairy prodded Sam’s shoulder with a hard, bony finger. ‘I’ve given you this and we’re quits. I’m clean again. You sodding well make damn sure. Now I’m gone.’
The Tooth Fairy got up from his chair and ambled down the hospital corridor, aggressively pushing a trolley out of his way before turning a corner out of sight. His head appeared briefly around the corner, glaring back at Sam.
‘Sam! Sam! Can’t you hear me when I’m talking to you?’ It was his mother. She grabbed his arm and pulled him from his chair. ‘Let’s go. You’ve got to have glasses.’
8
Telivision
On Saturday, delivered in an impressively large cardboard box, the Southalls’ first television set arrived. It was a momentous day all round, since it was also the day Sam was taken to the optician’s to collect his prescription National Health spectacles. He would be able, everyone remarked pointedly, to watch the new television in his new glasses. The circular lenses framed by thin blue wire made his head feel large and top-heavy.
Nev Southall had consulted Clive’s father Eric, who already had a set, and Eric had told him that a signal aerial erected in the attic would suffice. It would also save a fair few quid and the trouble of mounting it on the roof, Eric pointed out. The delivery man had disagreed. Tugging his earlobe and clicking his ballpoint pen, he told them they lived in a ‘depression’ on the wrong side of the transmitting station and needed a roof-mounted aerial.
‘Nothing,’ said Connie.
‘Nothing,’ chimed Sam.
‘What about that?’ shouted his father.
‘What about that?’ echoed Sam.
‘No good,’ said Connie.
‘No good,’ called Sam.
Sam had been posted at the top of the stairs. Nev, manipulating the aerial up in the attic couldn’t hear Connie, gamely twiddling the dials of the new TV in the living room, and vice versa. Sam’s job was to stand under the open loft door, relaying communications between the two of them.
‘Better.’ Connie.
‘Better.’ Sam.
‘Gone again.’
‘Gone again.’
To his credit, Nev endured a full quarter-hour of this before he started to lose his temper.
‘What’s happening down there?’
‘What’s happening down there?’
‘No good.’
‘No good.’
Nev’s disembodied and inverted head appeared, framed in the black hole giving way to the attic. He growled. Sam thought better of repeating the growl before his father’s legs swung down and dropped lightly to the top of the stairs. He could feel a slap to the ear coming on, and through no fault of his own. He remained upstairs as the dispute swelled in the living room. His father bounced up the stairs again and scrambled back into the attic, whereupon the entire process was repeated. Finally, with Sam losing interest and timing, and with the volley of his father’s curses augmenting in the attic, he found himself banished from the house.
He discovered Clive at Terry’s place, loitering in the doorway of Mr Morris’s workshop. Mr Morris was in a state of agitation, hurling things into a crate. He was clearing junk associated with his inventions, counting off his failures to Clive before binning them with unnecessary force.
‘. . . waste of time, Clive, waste of time.’ Sam joined Clive at the door of the workshop as a guitar-shaped object was dashed into the crate. Morris pulled another contraption from a shelf. There was something vaguely theatrical about his behaviour, as though he wanted someone to step in and stop him from doing this. ‘The Mechanical Butler. Another disaster. A machine for answering the telephone. No one interested.’ Crash. They saw a perfectly good tape-recorder discarded as the Mechanical Butler was flung into the crate. Sam peered into the crate after it. Whatever it had been, in its short life, the instrument was now trashed beyond all possible repair.
Then, ‘Oh, yes, here’s a good one: the Nightmare Interceptor. I made this one for Terry.’ Morris displayed an electrical clock trailing a mess of wires. Sam noticed a fleck of white spittle on Morris’s chin. ‘He had nightmares after that pike took his toes. Still gets ’em. So I made this. See that thing? It’s a thermal sensor – detects heat. When you get a, nightmare, you start breathing heavily, so you fix this on—’ He snapped a metal crocodile clip on Clive’s nose.
‘Ow!’ said Clive.
‘And when you start breathing heavily through your nose the sensor trips a switch which makes the alarm clock come on. So you wake up and no more nightmare. Simple, eh?’
‘Does it work?’ Clive wanted to know.
‘Never had a nightmare while using this did you?’ Mr Morris shouted to Terry.
Terry was standing under the apple trees at a short distance, whacking the last of the fallen Bramleys over the hedge with a cricket bat. ‘No.’
‘No,’ Morris said bitterly. ‘Couldn’t get to sleep with all these wires up your nose could you?’ Morris unclipped the peg from Clive’s nostril and flung the device into the crate.
The failure of the Nightmare Interceptor seemed to make Morris sad. He clamped his lips together and appeared to have nothing left to say to the boys. More unfinished devices followed the others into the crate. Such a frightening degree of violence accompanied his actions that Clive and Sam drifted away to join Terry. The apples mushed by his cricket bat laid a sharp tang of cider on the air, already sharp with the decline of autumn.
‘How’s your television?’ Terry wanted to know.
‘Can’t get a good picture,’ said Sam, bowling Terry an appl
e.
‘Why not?’
‘Because we’re all depressed.’
A rickety and rotting table stood under the apple tree, draped with golden leaves and laden with bruised fallers. A jamjar wasp-trap rested on the table, set there by Morris. Narrow holes had been poked in the lid; eight or nine wasps crawled across the inside of the glass. Sam put his eye as near to the jar as he dared. The glass vibrated with angry activity as the wasps searched for a way out. The furious energy inside the glass seemed almost enough to crack it.
After a while Morris’s large face appeared next to Sam’s. The boy could smell tobacco and the rot of alcohol on the man’s breath. Though Morris himself had set the wasp-trap, he behaved as if he was seeing it now for the first time.
‘You see,’ he said to Sam very quietly, ‘they can find a way in, but they can’t find a way out.’
Morris made Sam feel uneasy as he continued to stare into the jar of angry wasps. Sam peeled away. Morris covered his eyes with his hand, and Sam saw that his shoulders were shaking. Then the other boys saw it too. After a moment Morris returned to his workshop, closing the doors behind him.
It was Terry who suggested they should go. While they waited for him to collect his coat from the caravan, Sam glanced through the dusty glass windowpanes of the garage-workshop. With his back to the doors, Morris was seated at his workdesk. His hands grasped the desk and he seemed to be staring dead ahead at the wall. But as he looked Sam saw a familiar shadow whispering to Morris. The figure, a little over four feet tall, worked its pink tongue close to Morris’s ear, back and forth, back and forth.
‘Hey,’ Terry said quietly. ‘Let’s go.’
They sat up by the pond where Terry had lost two of his toes. The boys spent many hours there, ostensibly looking for the pike without ever seeing it. Terry had a small pen-knife, stolen from his father’s workshop. Whenever he was at the pond he opened and closed it more out of nervous habit than in any readiness for action should the pike choose to appear. After a while Clive went home. Sam hung on with Terry, knowing his friend was reluctant to return to the caravan. That day his fiddling with the penknife was more agitated than usual.
